life is a garden ➿ and the roots are all touching
How Much Does External Beauty Matter If You’re Spiritually Chopped?
Nothing you do matters if you are spiritually chopped.
Everyone has their reasons. People are on their different missions, walking their own journeys. I respect this difference, this autonomy. Though, whether folks realize it or not, we all have a couple basic things in common. There is a single unshakable truth: we want to be loved.
Fame, wealth, success, whatever are all surrogates for the uncompromising desire to be seen and loved.
When I speak of love, I want to clarify a few things. When I state that we all want to be “loved”, I am not directly speaking of the romantic or even the platonic type. When I speak of love, I speak of a state of being. Love is an immanence- love is a state of harmony with one's soul, with the world; it is the state of aligning one’s heartbeat with all that surrounds them. Further, love is understanding that the rhythm of the two were in sync all along.
Love is the understanding of the gravity in which a soul bears; every single one. Love is the shared joy and grief with someone you hold close. Love is the smile, the passing conversation you share with a neighbor (I want to refrain from using the word “stranger” to define others we are yet to know, as I would like us to see each and every one of us as neighbors within a village). Love is the grief you feel for a neighbor. Love is open, generous, compassionate: it is not withholding. Love does not react to envy or greed, nor is it transactional. Love is not fearful, but rather, motivated by curiosity. Love is a creative act.
A true act of loving changes you. A true act of love is uncomfortable. A true act of love confronts the deepest, darkest parts of yourself and asks that you stand on business, every single time. A true act of love graciously leaves space for parts of us less desirable.
True love is unafraid of negativity. Contrarily, it leaves space to hold all of our imperfect humanity. True love is accountable, not punishing. True love is transformative. You just can’t help it, actually. True love just changes you by it simply being itself.
Optimal-Positivity Culture is incapable of love. I cannot love someone if a checklist of "desirable" qualities and characteristics supersede my commitment to an individual, to humanity. Most traits valued in contemporary dating are quite trivial: height, salary, hobbies, and physical attractiveness. What is true is that I cannot love well if I betray myself. I cannot claim to love someone if I do not hold their dreams as close to my heart as my own. I cannot quantify “emotional labor” as debts to be repaid.
There is negativity in love. Optimization belongs in a Ford factory, and has no place in a relationship between others. Optimization is constant positivity, a well oiled “machine”. Constant positivity is not only damaging, but purely impossible. To view negativity as a problem to be eradicated from life is foolish and dangerous. Conflict is an opportunity to practice love as a creative act. In avoidance of conflict, we stunt our ability for growth. Avoiding conflict is synonymous to cutting down a centuries old tree to make furniture to then be discarded after a single year after undergraduate housing. We are not machines.
We live in a culture that believes in nothing. Well, I guess it is said that we believe in capital, an idol made of dollar signs, but even so, do we really believe in it? Do we subject ourselves to this uninspired way of life because we are uncreative, void of hope and faith in one another? Is capital a true belief system or a tyrannical dictatorship? What are you choosing to serve?
I often see unloving people wanting to receive love. This is a funny symptom of our times. “I will give love once I get it” is an attitude I witness everyday. We lack faith in one another, so we test each other and need to be proven. We need the receipts. I will show you only if you show me: a tragic story that rarely unravels gracefully.
Transcendence can be inspired by others, but ultimately, is a pursuit between you and a force that cannot be defined or measured by the material world (many call this God). I will resent someone if I desperately, exclusively search for transcendence in them and them only, as they are imperfect flesh and blood like me. Though, the Other can serve as a catalyst: an experience of true love is the way we are brought closer to transcendence. An act of love can lead me towards a more compassionate understanding of others, and by extension, lead me to see the beauty in things outside of myself. This then, leads to a spirit bursting and vibrant with an ability to find love in many places.
Love can be found in moments when we see a beautiful river, when we are moved by nature. Love is found when we don’t understand, when what we feel surpasses logic. Love is everywhere for those who can see.
Though immanence and transcendence are different things, they do quench a similar thirst of the soul. Immanence says we are connected, we are one. Transcendence reminds us that there is something bigger, that everything is not to be understood. Immanence is hope in the world that surrounds us. Transcendence reminds us why we have faith.
So, what is the point of doing anything if we are spiritually chopped? What is the point of a ritual of beauty, putting on makeup, having a ten step skincare routine, buying Super Expensive Stuff, getting a hair transplant, adorning ourselves in jewels and oils, all if we have no concern for emanating true love, if we have no concern for the pursuit of immanence and transcendence?
To be frank, it is lipstick on a pig. I think beauty (or hotness, or whatever) void of true love is all a trite and pastiche misinterpretation of life’s calling. It must mean something if we have carried on the social, emotional qualities of humanity in evolution. It must mean something if, for honest to god survival, we need to be nourished and cared for by each other.
You cannot UberEats yourself a tender conversation with a friend, Door Dash a loving embrace with someone who cherishes you despite it all. A robot could make you cum, but is that all sex is really about? What is a Labubu a surrogate for? What desires are you suppressing and distracting yourself from as you rip open blind box after blind box?
You have to open your heart to be known. You have to be super fucking uncomfortable to be the person you want to be, but you aren’t yet. To change, you have to, well, change. To change takes loving compassion. Patience. You have to surrender to the erotics of life, cross the threshhold towards the unknown to get there. It takes time. It is scary because life is supposed to be. Shoes are meant to be worn.
We have an epidemic of well dressed people with nowhere to go, a baddie inflation as the eternal soul deflates, men peacocking as soft with no desire to confront reality. Everyone looks great, but what good does that do us? Achieving a self that is marketable and visually digestible to a general public only creates a homogeneity of boredom that threatens our ability to transcend. If everything looks and feels the same, how do we even figure out what we love? This pacified, infantilized state of constant positivity is killing us.
When you die, you die. Like, that's kind of it. Even if you believe in reincarnation, you still pass from the life you have currently. Look around you. This is finite. Some themes and people may return, but nothing will be exactly the same. Your best friend, your favorite coffee shop, your crush, that tree you pass by on the way to work, that bridge you cross on the subway every morning, all of these things will one day be gone. That is what makes this all so precious.
I don’t believe in rushing, but what I do believe in is the inherent urgency of things, an urgency that emerges from the undertone of death. I believe in taking your time, I believe in both letting things reveal themselves and in being intentional. I believe in laughter, in taking things very seriously. I believe in love.
I hope you use that big, beautiful brain of yours to honor the legacy of humanity and creation, not towards contributing to the decline of mankind. I hope you use your desire for acceptance to bring you closer to others, to love them, to hold life as dear as it demands to be. Don’t push people away. It is possible they may never come back, so likely that the thing you wanted but you were so afraid of never finds you again. Be graceful, but hold on.
When I was fifteen I wanted to die. As a formerly-suicidal person, you are in a constant state of recovery for the rest of your life. Each moment of joy I experience is the little accountability stone, worn down from anxious-furious rubbing between index and thumb that holds my shit together.When you’ve been suicidal, every successive year you continue living is a pleasant surprise. I mean it when I say: I’m just happy to be here, man.
Everyone is worried about finding a lover, starting a family, getting a promotion, what others think of them, if their leg hair is growing out, all that shit. I’m not saying I’m above any of that, but those voices in my head are a bit more muffled, drowned out by the gratitude of even making it this far. When I walk through a park and brush my fingertips against each branch, see the light weaving through the leaves, witness neighbors smiling together so lovingly, watch the butterflies dance together as they were made to do, it's all so expansive. I mean, that's the meaning of life. It’s all too much sometimes. You are telling me I get to be here, in this beautiful world? The same one I wanted to depart from?
Next year will be my fifteenth year away from being fifteen, fifteen years away from a peak of suicidal ruminations.
Fifteen birthdays. Six boyfriends. A melange mix-bag of unresolved romances with all kinds of people. Hundreds of friends, maybe even thousands. Handful of enemies. A few aggressive friend breakups. Many loved ones passing. A high school diploma, an undergraduate degree. Dozens of workshops and classes taken. Big beef with parents. Big resolution with parents. Over ten different jobs, not including freelance gigs. Trip abroad with my best friend. Another trip with another best friend. So many best friends. So many beers. So many beers with friends. Thousands of spherical fruits consumed. Thousands of hours spent dancing. Thousands of kisses and hands held. Hundreds of ceramic objects crafted, thousands of drawings made. Hundreds of books read. Tens of thousands of hours of conversation, hundreds of hours teaching. Many meals shared, many meals cooked. An unfathomable quantity of steps. Many trails walked, many mountainsides scaled. Deep sorrow. Explosive joy. Impenetrable grief. Ecstatic euphoria. All between now and the time I really wanted to die.
Now, a particular memory comes to mind. The first time I got really, really, really high, I got really, really, really hungry. It was so embarrassing. Weed is a lot stronger in California, and here I was, smoking dispensary weed for the first time. This is a normal side effect of THC (there are whole movies about this, i.e. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle), but I just couldn’t bring myself to admit my desires.
Instead of asking for food in his parent’s house, I snuck away to my guest room and looked through my bag for any semblance of sustenance. Mind you, my bag was stuffed to the brim, a carry-on of inappropriate proportions for a four day trip. I had flown to California on a budget airline with the last bit of cash I had from my horrible brunch barista job where I served pitchers of Sangria containing ungodly amounts of the worst brandy and granulated sugar, so I couldn’t afford a bigger bag allowance. Excavating under layers of tightly rolled t-shirts and miscellaneous art supplies, I almost lost hope. There must be a granola bar, something. Anything. Please.
After an eternity of searching, I found a crushed and flattened bag of Kings Hawaiian rolls in the bottom of my bag, half eaten. With a renewed spirit and my dry ass mouth, I devoured these flat breads as if it was my first day on earth, like it was the first thing I had ever eaten in my whole goddamn life. Bliss.
Later that day, we drove around Carlsbad smoking out of a tiny bubbler in the back seat, driving to the only thing we could think about: carne asada fries. I can’t really recall much from that trip (hence, the marijuana consumption), but I viscerally remember the feeling of the blissful, cool guacamole and hot layers of cheese-steak-fries combining into a damn near perfect harmony in my mouth.
I remember the taco place being a drive through. I remember trying to order while incapacitated by my first experience of legal weed. I remember the sun was golden warm, that it felt nice on my skin. It must have been close to five or six in the evening. There must have been more people than seats in the vehicle. I don't remember a lot of things, but I remember thinking that this was the beginning of the rest of my life, that I looked forward to eating my leftovers later. I remember laughter. I felt love.
I’ve felt that way many times since, but there is an irreplaceable purity of these profoundly stupid experiences in early adolescence, a vibrant spirit which carries you for the rest of an existence. And in this existence, what they don’t tell you is that you must be terribly intentional in deciding what you want to feel, in deciding how you will live to honor your eighteen year old self that reached carne asada fry ecstasy.
You can reach this ecstasy at any age. You just have to believe you deserve it, to release the inhibitions of a current self that has forgotten to play, to release the harmful patterns we’ve inherited from fear. If you think you can achieve things by accident, that you can attain joy by just wishing for it, this type of bliss won’t find you. As a young person, the naivety, the purity of spirit, the openness to newness creates perfect conditions for bliss to find us. Being youthful is a simple state of openness.
I take life seriously through maintaining the innocence of an eighteen year old self that flew a budget airline with the last of my money to spend a long weekend with an internet friend. Stupid? Sure. Intentional? Absolutely. When I was booking that ticket, it felt like now or never, and it kind of was.
I make a lot of “bad” choices, but I can assure you of a few things. Always sincere, always earnest, I am glad I still remember the color of the sky of that day when I got too high for the first time. Life is serious. Play is the force of life. Be serious about play. To play hard is to love deeply. To love is to live creatively.
You cannot fabricate a moment of true bliss but you must diligently create the ideal conditions for it to cultivate through practice, through play. Your heart must be ready to identify and grasp this bliss, along with a rigorously courageous spirit to capture a moment when it stops you dead in your tracks. Hesitation kills us. Be ready. Be open. Equip yourself in love well so that when the one or the thing you want to love so badly appears in front of you, you can jump in front of that moving train and grab it, holding on for dear fucking life. You think this will find you again, but it won’t, and because you didn’t train, you were not ready, you were indecisive, you were cowardly. You refused to move: now you are being flattened by the momentum of metal and regret at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Your whole life was spent on making an optimal Tinder profile that you forgot to spontaneously talk to the people standing in line with you.
So, how much does external beauty matter if you’re spiritually chopped?
Nothing you do matters if you are spiritually chopped.
Everyone has their reasons. People are on their different missions, walking their own journeys. I respect this difference, this autonomy. Though, whether folks realize it or not, we all have a couple basic things in common. There is a single unshakable truth: we want to be loved.
Fame, wealth, success, whatever are all surrogates for the uncompromising desire to be seen and loved.
When I speak of love, I want to clarify a few things. When I state that we all want to be “loved”, I am not directly speaking of the romantic or even the platonic type. When I speak of love, I speak of a state of being. Love is an immanence- love is a state of harmony with one's soul, with the world; it is the state of aligning one’s heartbeat with all that surrounds them. Further, love is understanding that the rhythm of the two were in sync all along.
Love is the understanding of the gravity in which a soul bears; every single one. Love is the shared joy and grief with someone you hold close. Love is the smile, the passing conversation you share with a neighbor (I want to refrain from using the word “stranger” to define others we are yet to know, as I would like us to see each and every one of us as neighbors within a village). Love is the grief you feel for a neighbor. Love is open, generous, compassionate: it is not withholding. Love does not react to envy or greed, nor is it transactional. Love is not fearful, but rather, motivated by curiosity. Love is a creative act.
A true act of loving changes you. A true act of love is uncomfortable. A true act of love confronts the deepest, darkest parts of yourself and asks that you stand on business, every single time. A true act of love graciously leaves space for parts of us less desirable.
True love is unafraid of negativity. Contrarily, it leaves space to hold all of our imperfect humanity. True love is accountable, not punishing. True love is transformative. You just can’t help it, actually. True love just changes you by it simply being itself.
Optimal-Positivity Culture is incapable of love. I cannot love someone if a checklist of "desirable" qualities and characteristics supersede my commitment to an individual, to humanity. Most traits valued in contemporary dating are quite trivial: height, salary, hobbies, and physical attractiveness. What is true is that I cannot love well if I betray myself. I cannot claim to love someone if I do not hold their dreams as close to my heart as my own. I cannot quantify “emotional labor” as debts to be repaid.
There is negativity in love. Optimization belongs in a Ford factory, and has no place in a relationship between others. Optimization is constant positivity, a well oiled “machine”. Constant positivity is not only damaging, but purely impossible. To view negativity as a problem to be eradicated from life is foolish and dangerous. Conflict is an opportunity to practice love as a creative act. In avoidance of conflict, we stunt our ability for growth. Avoiding conflict is synonymous to cutting down a centuries old tree to make furniture to then be discarded after a single year after undergraduate housing. We are not machines.
We live in a culture that believes in nothing. Well, I guess it is said that we believe in capital, an idol made of dollar signs, but even so, do we really believe in it? Do we subject ourselves to this uninspired way of life because we are uncreative, void of hope and faith in one another? Is capital a true belief system or a tyrannical dictatorship? What are you choosing to serve?
I often see unloving people wanting to receive love. This is a funny symptom of our times. “I will give love once I get it” is an attitude I witness everyday. We lack faith in one another, so we test each other and need to be proven. We need the receipts. I will show you only if you show me: a tragic story that rarely unravels gracefully.
Transcendence can be inspired by others, but ultimately, is a pursuit between you and a force that cannot be defined or measured by the material world (many call this God). I will resent someone if I desperately, exclusively search for transcendence in them and them only, as they are imperfect flesh and blood like me. Though, the Other can serve as a catalyst: an experience of true love is the way we are brought closer to transcendence. An act of love can lead me towards a more compassionate understanding of others, and by extension, lead me to see the beauty in things outside of myself. This then, leads to a spirit bursting and vibrant with an ability to find love in many places.
Love can be found in moments when we see a beautiful river, when we are moved by nature. Love is found when we don’t understand, when what we feel surpasses logic. Love is everywhere for those who can see.
Though immanence and transcendence are different things, they do quench a similar thirst of the soul. Immanence says we are connected, we are one. Transcendence reminds us that there is something bigger, that everything is not to be understood. Immanence is hope in the world that surrounds us. Transcendence reminds us why we have faith.
So, what is the point of doing anything if we are spiritually chopped? What is the point of a ritual of beauty, putting on makeup, having a ten step skincare routine, buying Super Expensive Stuff, getting a hair transplant, adorning ourselves in jewels and oils, all if we have no concern for emanating true love, if we have no concern for the pursuit of immanence and transcendence?
To be frank, it is lipstick on a pig. I think beauty (or hotness, or whatever) void of true love is all a trite and pastiche misinterpretation of life’s calling. It must mean something if we have carried on the social, emotional qualities of humanity in evolution. It must mean something if, for honest to god survival, we need to be nourished and cared for by each other.
You cannot UberEats yourself a tender conversation with a friend, Door Dash a loving embrace with someone who cherishes you despite it all. A robot could make you cum, but is that all sex is really about? What is a Labubu a surrogate for? What desires are you suppressing and distracting yourself from as you rip open blind box after blind box?
You have to open your heart to be known. You have to be super fucking uncomfortable to be the person you want to be, but you aren’t yet. To change, you have to, well, change. To change takes loving compassion. Patience. You have to surrender to the erotics of life, cross the threshhold towards the unknown to get there. It takes time. It is scary because life is supposed to be. Shoes are meant to be worn.
We have an epidemic of well dressed people with nowhere to go, a baddie inflation as the eternal soul deflates, men peacocking as soft with no desire to confront reality. Everyone looks great, but what good does that do us? Achieving a self that is marketable and visually digestible to a general public only creates a homogeneity of boredom that threatens our ability to transcend. If everything looks and feels the same, how do we even figure out what we love? This pacified, infantilized state of constant positivity is killing us.
When you die, you die. Like, that's kind of it. Even if you believe in reincarnation, you still pass from the life you have currently. Look around you. This is finite. Some themes and people may return, but nothing will be exactly the same. Your best friend, your favorite coffee shop, your crush, that tree you pass by on the way to work, that bridge you cross on the subway every morning, all of these things will one day be gone. That is what makes this all so precious.
I don’t believe in rushing, but what I do believe in is the inherent urgency of things, an urgency that emerges from the undertone of death. I believe in taking your time, I believe in both letting things reveal themselves and in being intentional. I believe in laughter, in taking things very seriously. I believe in love.
I hope you use that big, beautiful brain of yours to honor the legacy of humanity and creation, not towards contributing to the decline of mankind. I hope you use your desire for acceptance to bring you closer to others, to love them, to hold life as dear as it demands to be. Don’t push people away. It is possible they may never come back, so likely that the thing you wanted but you were so afraid of never finds you again. Be graceful, but hold on.
When I was fifteen I wanted to die. As a formerly-suicidal person, you are in a constant state of recovery for the rest of your life. Each moment of joy I experience is the little accountability stone, worn down from anxious-furious rubbing between index and thumb that holds my shit together.When you’ve been suicidal, every successive year you continue living is a pleasant surprise. I mean it when I say: I’m just happy to be here, man.
Everyone is worried about finding a lover, starting a family, getting a promotion, what others think of them, if their leg hair is growing out, all that shit. I’m not saying I’m above any of that, but those voices in my head are a bit more muffled, drowned out by the gratitude of even making it this far. When I walk through a park and brush my fingertips against each branch, see the light weaving through the leaves, witness neighbors smiling together so lovingly, watch the butterflies dance together as they were made to do, it's all so expansive. I mean, that's the meaning of life. It’s all too much sometimes. You are telling me I get to be here, in this beautiful world? The same one I wanted to depart from?
Next year will be my fifteenth year away from being fifteen, fifteen years away from a peak of suicidal ruminations.
Fifteen birthdays. Six boyfriends. A melange mix-bag of unresolved romances with all kinds of people. Hundreds of friends, maybe even thousands. Handful of enemies. A few aggressive friend breakups. Many loved ones passing. A high school diploma, an undergraduate degree. Dozens of workshops and classes taken. Big beef with parents. Big resolution with parents. Over ten different jobs, not including freelance gigs. Trip abroad with my best friend. Another trip with another best friend. So many best friends. So many beers. So many beers with friends. Thousands of spherical fruits consumed. Thousands of hours spent dancing. Thousands of kisses and hands held. Hundreds of ceramic objects crafted, thousands of drawings made. Hundreds of books read. Tens of thousands of hours of conversation, hundreds of hours teaching. Many meals shared, many meals cooked. An unfathomable quantity of steps. Many trails walked, many mountainsides scaled. Deep sorrow. Explosive joy. Impenetrable grief. Ecstatic euphoria. All between now and the time I really wanted to die.
Now, a particular memory comes to mind. The first time I got really, really, really high, I got really, really, really hungry. It was so embarrassing. Weed is a lot stronger in California, and here I was, smoking dispensary weed for the first time. This is a normal side effect of THC (there are whole movies about this, i.e. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle), but I just couldn’t bring myself to admit my desires.
Instead of asking for food in his parent’s house, I snuck away to my guest room and looked through my bag for any semblance of sustenance. Mind you, my bag was stuffed to the brim, a carry-on of inappropriate proportions for a four day trip. I had flown to California on a budget airline with the last bit of cash I had from my horrible brunch barista job where I served pitchers of Sangria containing ungodly amounts of the worst brandy and granulated sugar, so I couldn’t afford a bigger bag allowance. Excavating under layers of tightly rolled t-shirts and miscellaneous art supplies, I almost lost hope. There must be a granola bar, something. Anything. Please.
After an eternity of searching, I found a crushed and flattened bag of Kings Hawaiian rolls in the bottom of my bag, half eaten. With a renewed spirit and my dry ass mouth, I devoured these flat breads as if it was my first day on earth, like it was the first thing I had ever eaten in my whole goddamn life. Bliss.
Later that day, we drove around Carlsbad smoking out of a tiny bubbler in the back seat, driving to the only thing we could think about: carne asada fries. I can’t really recall much from that trip (hence, the marijuana consumption), but I viscerally remember the feeling of the blissful, cool guacamole and hot layers of cheese-steak-fries combining into a damn near perfect harmony in my mouth.
I remember the taco place being a drive through. I remember trying to order while incapacitated by my first experience of legal weed. I remember the sun was golden warm, that it felt nice on my skin. It must have been close to five or six in the evening. There must have been more people than seats in the vehicle. I don't remember a lot of things, but I remember thinking that this was the beginning of the rest of my life, that I looked forward to eating my leftovers later. I remember laughter. I felt love.
I’ve felt that way many times since, but there is an irreplaceable purity of these profoundly stupid experiences in early adolescence, a vibrant spirit which carries you for the rest of an existence. And in this existence, what they don’t tell you is that you must be terribly intentional in deciding what you want to feel, in deciding how you will live to honor your eighteen year old self that reached carne asada fry ecstasy.
You can reach this ecstasy at any age. You just have to believe you deserve it, to release the inhibitions of a current self that has forgotten to play, to release the harmful patterns we’ve inherited from fear. If you think you can achieve things by accident, that you can attain joy by just wishing for it, this type of bliss won’t find you. As a young person, the naivety, the purity of spirit, the openness to newness creates perfect conditions for bliss to find us. Being youthful is a simple state of openness.
I take life seriously through maintaining the innocence of an eighteen year old self that flew a budget airline with the last of my money to spend a long weekend with an internet friend. Stupid? Sure. Intentional? Absolutely. When I was booking that ticket, it felt like now or never, and it kind of was.
I make a lot of “bad” choices, but I can assure you of a few things. Always sincere, always earnest, I am glad I still remember the color of the sky of that day when I got too high for the first time. Life is serious. Play is the force of life. Be serious about play. To play hard is to love deeply. To love is to live creatively.
You cannot fabricate a moment of true bliss but you must diligently create the ideal conditions for it to cultivate through practice, through play. Your heart must be ready to identify and grasp this bliss, along with a rigorously courageous spirit to capture a moment when it stops you dead in your tracks. Hesitation kills us. Be ready. Be open. Equip yourself in love well so that when the one or the thing you want to love so badly appears in front of you, you can jump in front of that moving train and grab it, holding on for dear fucking life. You think this will find you again, but it won’t, and because you didn’t train, you were not ready, you were indecisive, you were cowardly. You refused to move: now you are being flattened by the momentum of metal and regret at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Your whole life was spent on making an optimal Tinder profile that you forgot to spontaneously talk to the people standing in line with you.
So, how much does external beauty matter if you’re spiritually chopped?
last edited 7/16/25